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When I was young, good looking, and conceited…

And other stories about other people which will tell you a bit more about me without me revealing too much.

A friend alerted me to this interview with guitarist Allyson Baker, which was fascinating for me. she’s a couple of years younger, but at least while she was in Toronto, had many parallel experiences to me. She’s just a bit cooler, and I never really got into what I considered the hardcore scene in town.

We both loved Suckerpunch – still to this day the best live band I’ve seen, and the only one that I can truly say that you could feel the energy in the room. Here’s a video of a show I was at. The holy grail is a cable access show from about 1992 but I don’t think I’ll ever see that again.

I didn’t really know Allyson – I crashed her radio show once, and tried to arrange shows between her band, the Shuttlecocks, and my then band (the) Exiles Club, and recognized her as a peer at Suckerpunch shows (everybody else at their shows was 5-10 years older). I sure as hell wasn’t going to see the Dwarves as a 14-year old, though. I was more into the whole NWONW scene in the UK. And locally I would only consider seeing Suckerpunch, The Leather Uppers, Parts Unknown, and The Sinisters. All the rest of my energy was put into discovering bands that hadn’t played in decades.

And here’s a photo of my high school band – the only one from our first show. After I stopped playing drums for them, I managed helped them hustle gigs. Incidentally that fell apart after 6 months when nobody had saved any money to buy their own gear and stop borrowing mine.

And last. I think I mentioned I used to have a video blog? That’s a few years on from the rest of this post, but it makes sense to keep it all together. This is one of my favourite videos – complete with the pixelation that caused me to replace my camera (It was cheap but did fun things in low-light. I still prefer the video quality to some higher-end DV). The show was the first night of 3 concerts related to NXNE in 2006. My roommates and I got in for free because the band (King Khan and the Shrines) was staying at our place – we had a lot of couch space and were only 5 minutes away from the venue. Just as fun as it looks, and proof that Toronto audiences don’t suck (it’s the bands complaining about the audience who don’t have what it takes).